Movie review: Never Look Away is just above average

By Al Alexander/For the Patriot Ledger

Saturday

Feb 16, 2019 at 4:31 PM

Pretentious, indulgent and inexplicably Oscar-nominated, “Never Look Away” is but a middling celebration of the creative process seen through the jaundiced eyes of an East German artist seeking “truth.” Loosely based on the life of Gerhard Richter, the three-hour-plus epic from Oscar-winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is befitting the axiom “watching paint dry.” This despite a scenario encompassing abortion, suicide, Nazis, the KGB.

What more could you want? Well, to start with, an editor more cutting than Patricia Rommel, who limits the film’s pace to that of a snail. Add that to a leading man in the dull, expressionless Tom Schilling, and you’ve got a movie requiring Herculean patience. Yet, visually, it’s quite something, courtesy of Caleb (dad to Emily and Zooey) Deschanel, deservedly nominated for the cinematography Oscar. He shoots like painters paint, in short, delicate strokes that use light and shadow to create dreamlike images in tune with the surrealness of a story in which evil and beauty perpetually juxtapose.

But pretty pictures can only take a movie so far. And for about an hour it’s enough. Then fatigue sets in, as implausibilities mount and laughable melodrama sets in. There’s a secret, you see, known only to us, involving a gynecologist with ties to Hitler’s SS and the führer's hideous Euthanasia Program, which sought to eliminate people with mental and physical impairments as a means to purify bloodlines and free medical facilities for “the more deserving” German soldiers. The doctor’s name is Carl Seeband (von Donnersmarck regular Sebastian Koch), a smug, vain man who loves his job just a bit too much. As is von Donnersmarck’s desire, Seeband is hiss-worthy -- albeit in a cartoonish manner. Irony, of course, is his destiny.

And its delivery boy is Schilling’s Kurt Barnert, an aspiring artist who’s had his own brushes with death, most notably his lovely, loving Aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), the curvaceous woman who inspired him to draw. When Kurt was a kid, Auntie took him to see Hitler’s notorious Degenerate Art exhibit in Dresden. While little Kurt is fascinated by the “hedonistic” sculptures and paintings, our eyes are glued to God’s masterpiece, Rosendahl, lusciously outfitted in a light-green shade of Marilyn Monroe’s famous white halter gown. Who knew women dressed like that in the 1930s?

These opening scenes, capped by a shot of young Kurt nestled to Auntie’s bosom, is the bodacious kickoff for a three-decade folly in which Nazis will come and go, Stalin will rise and fall and painting will come in and out of favor. We check in every two or three years with the three main players, Kurt, the Doc, and Seeband’s daughter, who just so happens to be named Elisabeth (“Franz’” Paula Beer) and is a dead-ringer for Kurt’s long-departed Auntie. What are the odds?

As the years pass, Kurt and Elisabeth II, or Ellie, as Kurt calls her, get busy -- a lot. On the rare occasion when they take a break, we’re subjected to copious scenes of Kurt on a years-long quest to find what Auntie meant when she said “everything that’s true is beautiful.” Sounds like a greeting card, right? Not to Kurt, who paints in all sorts of styles and mediums until finding just the right one -- just before the credits roll. Good timing!

Admittedly, those last 30 minutes are pretty great, as we watch Kurt stumble through the creative process after finding inspiration in old family photos. It’s sort of like when Lady Gaga’s character in “A Star Is Born” finally finds her voice while singing “Shallow.” It arrives through a combination of light and reflection, both in the literal sense and in Kurt’s existential breakthrough. The rest, though, is pretty forgettable. Like with his last film, the much-maligned “The Tourist,” von Donnersmarck largely falls victim to Hollywood-like urges to overstate the obvious in lieu of nuance and subtext. It’s a far cry from his Oscar-winning “The Lives of Others,” which overflowed with the type of suspense he strives and fails to instill here.

Yet, like a good-bad Lifetime movie, you can’t help submitting to “Away’s” guilty pleasures. Then it occurs to you this digital pablum robbed “Burning” of its far-more-deserving slot in this year’s Best Foreign Language race. Why? Even the 87-year-old Richter can’t believe it. He hates “Never Look Away,” because, he says, it gets everything about him and his life wrong. Ah, but did he not notice the portrait-ready beauty of Beer and Rosendahl? To me, that’s worth more than one of Richter’s paintings, priced into the tens of millions. Ironic, too, since “Never Look Away” is barely worth the film it’s printed on.